


Merry Fucking Christmas

by dragonimp



Series: Turning Points [5]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Christmas, Christmas Party, Existential Angst, Gen, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Underage Drinking, families suck sometimes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:54:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28333443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonimp/pseuds/dragonimp
Summary: On his second Christmas back in the States, Warlock commiserates with his cousin about conservative families and not living up to expectations.
Series: Turning Points [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1657417
Comments: 9
Kudos: 54





	Merry Fucking Christmas

**Author's Note:**

> I had planned to write a much lighter holiday story, but given *vague wave* that really didn't happen. Instead we get some Warlock angst.

Warlock’s face hurt from smiling.

He’d long since given up trying to remember which of the adults he was being expected to make nice with were his father’s political colleagues, which were his mom’s friends (gossip buddies), and which were relatives. They all said the same things: “Oh my, how you’ve grown!” (Every year. As if it was a surprise.) “Are you enjoying being back in the States?” (About as much as he’d enjoyed his last trip to the dentist.) “Such a handsome young man now.” (As if he was supposed to be happy about that.) “Look at you, little man! You must be about ready to follow in your dad’s footsteps.”

“Maybe when Hell freezes over,” Warlock muttered to himself through the smile.

Fuck Christmas parties. He’d rather be up in his room on his Switch—or staring at the wall, even—but his parents had made it clear that he couldn’t “pout and mope all evening like last year.” So here he was, with his Martinelli’s, making the rounds like a good little son.

Fuck Christmas.

Last year he’d wanted nothing more than to go back to England. Hoping that maybe— _maybe_ —if he got there things could somehow go back to how they’d been before Megiddo.

This year he’d accepted that that wasn’t going to happen. But that didn’t mean he had to be happy about it.

But he did have to smile and play the dutiful son.

Warlock finally managed to edge away from the lastest cousin-something-removed and made his way over to the one other attendee anywhere near his age, his cousin Chloe. She looked about as excited to be there as he was.

Chloe was a few years older, but she used to play with him whenever their families got together. He remembered them sneaking out of bed to spy on the adults several Christmases ago when Chloe and her parents had visited them in England. (He’s pretty sure Nanny had seen them, but that didn’t count.)

“Hey Chloe. Nice barrette,” he said, gesturing to the metal flower clipped into her hair. A flower in very particular shades of blue, purple, and magenta. “Playing Conservative Family Chicken?”

Chloe smirked behind her Martinelli’s flute. “Something like that. You’re the first to even notice it.”

“That’s not a surprise,” Warlock said with a roll of his eyes. “They don’t exactly pay attention.” Anything that deviated from his parents’ perfect little world simply didn’t exist for them. All of the adults here were like that.

Chloe blew out her lips in agreement. “Think they’d even notice if we skipped out?”

“You’ve made the rounds, right? Made nice and gotten all the pats on the head?”

“Of course.”

“Then no. They’ll be glad to be rid of us.”

“Yeah. Let’s bail.”

None of them noticed when Chloe snagged a half empty bottle of champagne on the way to the back door, either.

* * *

“. . . So then she was like, ‘but this is our _third date_!’”

Warlock laughed. “How do you not know you’re dating? Aren’t there like, rules or something? Things you do on dates that you don’t do on, um, not-dates?”

“No! That’s just it! I mean, yeah, there is with guys, it gets all formal and stuff, but not with girls! That’s the problem!”

“Still!” Warlock took a swig of the champagne and made a face. “Do adults actually _like_ this stuff?”

“I dunno, I think it’s an _acquired taste_ or something. Beer’s worse. Ever smelled stale beer? Smells like dog piss.”

“Ugh!”

“Dunno why anyone drinks that shit. At least this shit is drinkable.” Chloe took the bottle from him and took a drink, maybe to prove the point. “The nice thing, though? About being two girls, I mean? My parents can’t tell. They think we’re just ‘girlfriends,’ not _girlfriends_. We can have all the sleepovers we want—”

“Eewww. . . .”

She hit his arm with the butt of the champagne bottle. “Shut _up_ , we haven’t _done_ anything. Not that I’d tell you, you toddler.”

Warlock grabbed the bottle and took another grimacing swallow. “Still. You worried about them? Finding out? What d’you think they’d do?”

Chloe made a noncommittal noise and took the bottle back. “Argue with me, probably. A hundred-n-one reasons why bisexuality isn’t real and it’s ‘just a phase.’ Whatever else Fox News is spouting this week.”

Warlock chewed his lip. ”Ever . . . ever think they’ll kick you out?”

Chloe made a motion that might have been a shrug. “Doesn’t . . . doesn’t really jive with their precious _family values_ , does it?”

Warlock dug his heel into the the flower bed in front of their bench, uprooting what was no doubt some carefully planted landscaping.

He could just about hear Brother Francis scolding him—not that Brother Francis ever _scolded_ , exactly—for taking his feelings out on the poor plants. Nanny would’ve told him he ought to take it out _somewhere_ , oughtn't he.

He dug his heel further into the dirt.

All of that seemed was a world away from his aunt and uncle’s house in San Diego.

Christmas night being _warm_ outside was just _wrong_.

A lot of things were wrong.

Chloe nudged him, handing over the champagne. “. . . You worried about being kicked out? Warlock?”

He took the bottle. Took another swallow of that godawful adult drink. “If I _did_ get kicked out. I’d just go back to England. Go live with my nanny.”

“What, fly back all on your own?”

“Yeah. Why not?” He knew where his passport was kept. Knew his dad’s passwords and which credit cards he paid attention to and which he didn’t. Knew the combination to the safe with the “rainy day cash.” Even knew how to set it up so he could fly as an unaccompanied minor.

The only thing he didn’t know—was how to find Nanny.

It had been over a year and he still couldn’t find any record of any Lilith Ashteroth ever living in the UK or anywhere. And while there were plenty of men named Francis, so far none of them was the gardener with the soft smile and kind eyes he remembered.

He wasn’t surprised, really. People like them didn’t have things like birth certificates or drivers licenses or CVs.

But still. It somehow seemed like they were just . . . part of London. Like if he just went back there and looked, they’d be there.

Probably he was just being a stupid kid.

“Your nanny was that scary lady with the sunglasses, right? Looked like a deranged Mary Poppins?”

That startled him into a laugh. That Christmas must’ve been four years ago, but trust Nanny to leave an impression. “Yep. That’s her.”

“What was with the sunglasses, anyway?”

“U-umm, I think she had an eye condition.”

Warlock _didn’t_ say: because her eyes were yellow and slitted like a snake. He didn’t say that he used to make a game out of trying to catch glimpses of them behind the dark lenses, because he thought they were the coolest thing ever. Didn’t say that sometimes when she hissed her words, he thought maybe Nanny _was_ a snake. That maybe, the tattoo by her ear wasn’t just a tattoo.

Chloe would think he was a stupid kid who believed in fairy tales.

Sometimes he wondered if he was.

Warlock thought about Nanny telling him that it didn’t matter that the Santa Claus his dad had hired smelled like beer and cigarettes, that one was just an actor and anyway when he raised the Legions of Darkness he could grind all those bad fake Santas under his heel. And he thought about lighting the menorah while Brother Francis taught him about the Festival of Lights, telling him that he must have respect and compassion for all the world’s peoples and must _never, ever end the world_.

He’d take that over his dad’s stupid, stuffy parties a thousand times.

(It was his uncle’s house, but it was still his dad’s party. That’s just how these things worked.)

“Me and Jessica are talking about getting a room together when we go off to college,” Chloe was saying. “Then we can have our own parties. Make our own Christmas with cheap junk food and music that’s not from the 60s. Do whatever we want.”

“Aren’t you like a sophomore?”

“So? We’re planning ahead. Anyway, we haven’t decided what school we want to go to or anything, so maybe we’ll go to England for a semester or two and look up your nanny.”

“I thought you said Nanny was scary.”

“Yeah, but in a _cool_ way. I want to learn how to menace just by standing there like that. I remember when we were up there, my dad said something stupid, and your nanny just turned and just stared down the whole room. It was _awesome_.”

Warlock grinned. “That sounds about right. I’d like to know how to do that, too.” It would sure beat being his parents’ show piece of a child. “But I think part of that is just kinda. What Nanny _is_. It’s, uh. Inherent or something.” It probably wasn’t something ordinary mortals could do.

“Still. She’s like a role model. I’d like to menace down the assholes at school like that.”

“Y’know, I never thought of her as scary? She was just—Nanny.” He kicked at the flower bed. “And I’m pretty sure she and Brother Francis were dating or something.”

“Who?”

“The gardener. The only other person there who gave a _shit_ about me.” He kicked the dirt again for emphasis.

Chloe bumped his shoulder and handed him the champagne.

“Nanny and Brother Francis used to play this game.” Warlock paused to take a swallow of lukewarm champagne. “Nanny would tell me something really over-the-top evil, like with armies of demons and blood-n-pain—”

“Ew.”

“—and how I’ll soon be ‘grinding my enemies beneath my heel’ an’ stuff. And then Brother Francis would tell me how I needed to always have love and kindness and respect all living things, even sister slug—”

“ _Ew_!”

“—and never, _ever_ destroy the world. And they’d always end with, _don’t listen to her, listen to me. Don’t listen to him, listen to me_.”

“That sounds pretty wack. Are you sure they weren’t in, like, some cult or something? Or—rival cults? Maybe they both wanted to use you as a sacrifice or something.”

“Ew, no, nothing like that.” He was pretty sure, anyway. “See, here’s the thing: Nanny would _say_ , ‘don’t listen to him you listen to me,’ but then she’d say, ‘Warlock, dear, it’s a lovely day, why don’t you get some fresh air out in the garden?’ And always on the days Brother Francis worked. And Brother Francis would say something like, ‘Now Master Warlock, why don’t you run off to bed,’ and send me back to Nanny. Like they were trying to split even or something. And they always seemed like they were avoiding each other, but whenever they did pass by they would, like, _look_ at each other. Real quick, like they were trying not to, but it was like—like people in movies look at each other. That sounds lame, but I don’t know how else to say it. It’s just—they seemed like they were dating, or wanted to be dating, and didn’t want anyone to know. So they played this weird game where they passed me back and forth and did the over the top good-n-evil bit.”

“That still sounds wack.” Chloe took the champagne back and took a long drink. “But now I _really_ want to meet them.”

“Sometimes—sometimes I think they _were_ trying to prepare me for something.” Now that he had someone listening the whole thing wanted to spill out. “But whatever it was—I think I failed.”

“What? Why?”

Warlock kicked at the dirt, uprooting a hapless plant. “Megiddo.”

“What’s a ‘megiddo’?”

“It’s this place in the Middle East. Dad dragged us there from London for some diplomatic thing, But this Hastur guy—he was supposed to be our guide or something—totally brushed him off and came over to me instead, started talking about a dog and voices and all this other shit and when I didn’t tell him the right things he got really pissed and just vanished. And then Dad and Mom got pissed at me because I’d somehow offended the local guide and ruined their big diplomatic photo-op thing.” And somehow that had been more important to them than _the guy had just fricken vanished_. But then they never noticed those things.

“Ouch. That really sucks. But I don’t—I don’t really see what that has to do with your nanny or this gardener.”

“Well this Hastur guy, he—well he smelled of poo, but besides that, he—”

Warlock found himself floundering. How could he explain that his nanny hadn’t been human (he was pretty sure, anyway), and Brother Francis hadn’t been either, and underneath the poo smell and the terrible clothes he’d gotten the same taste in the back of his throat around this Hastur guy that he got around Nanny. Chloe would think he was just a stupid kid who believed in stupid fantasies.

“I think he came from the same place as Nanny,” he finished. Lamely. “Same—I dunno, same ‘cult’ or something, we’ll go with that. And he—well, whatever he wanted, I clearly wasn’t it.” Always a disappointment.

“Huh.” Chloe took another long drink of the champagne. “So, assuming you’re right—maybe it was _Nanny_ who failed. Ever think of that?”

“What?”

“Well you’re just a kid. You’re like, what, eleven?”

“Twelve.”

“Well you were eleven then, right? What’s an eleven-year-old supposed to do? You haven’t even hit puberty yet.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“All I’m saying is, if your nanny was supposed to be preparing you for something, and she didn’t, that’s on her. And that’s a shitty thing to do to a kid.”

“Well, I . . . I guess.”

It was hard to think that a woman who could warp the metal back of a chair just to free a stupid kid’s stupid head could have failed at anything. But Chloe had a point.

“Sill. I’m not what they wanted. I’m not what anyone wanted.”

“So? Fuck ’em. I’m not what my parents wanted either, and someday they’ll figure that out. And maybe then they’ll hate me, and yeah, that’ll suck. But I’m not gonna waste my time feeling bad about it. It’s their own damn fault for wanting me to be something I’m not.”

Warlock took a breath, and very carefully let it out. “Yeah. Fuck ’em.”

“Still want to go live with your nanny?”

“Yeah. That way I can get her to tell me what the hell that was all about.” And it still beat being his parents’ disappointment of a child. At least Nanny had paid attention to _him_ , not some fake plastic image of him.

Someday _his_ parents would figure out he wasn’t what they wanted. And his dad didn’t take well to not getting what he wanted.

Behind them the cadence of the party had changed, taking up the telltale sounds of people heading out.

Chloe poured the last of the champagne into the flower bed. “Think our dads have wrapped up their annual dick measuring contest?”

“Do they ever?”

“Nah. But it sounds like mom is finally kicking people out.”

Warlock sighed and pushed to his feet. “Which means my mom’ll probably be looking for me.”

“Hey, Warlock? Adults just suck sometimes. Take care, all right?”

“Yeah. You, too.”

“Merry fuckin’ Christmas or whatever.”

“Yeah. Merry fucking Christmas.”


End file.
